Shades of Woolf: Mapping the NYC thoughtscape

Here’s an interesting twist on the stream of consciousness technique Virginia Woolf used in several of her most famous novels. It’s a project that involves walking and talking. Simultaneously.

Andrew Irving, an anthropologist at the University of Manchester, decided to record the “inner dialogues of people walking in New York City—to map part of the city’s thoughtscape, layered beneath its audible soundscape.” To do so, he approached strangers at Manhattan intersections and asked if they would share what they were thinking.

Surprisingly, out of those he asked, about 100 said yes. He then asked the agreeable pedestrians to wear a microphone attached to a headset and speak their thoughts aloud as they walked. He filmed their walking and recorded their audio, then overlay one on top of the other for his project called “New York Stories: The Lives of Other Citizens.”